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	The Inequality of Life and Death by Göran Therborn Social Europe Journal   There is no more urgent social task in rich countries than to tackle vital inequality, the inequality of life, health, and death. European welfare states have handled many social issues posed by industrial capitalism. They have been most successful in dealing with old age poverty, much less so with child poverty. Inequalities of child development, of educational opportunities, and of adult life-course chances are enduring.   However, there is nothing like the failure even of generous, universalistic welfare states to reduce inequalities of life itself, i.e. of life and death expectancy. The best historical data available, from England and Wales, show that the gap of years on the earth between people of different social classes actually widened from the years starting just before World War I and then again from the mid-1990s.   Currently, the gap continues to widen in a number of countries. In the UK for instance, between Glasgow and the London borough of Chelsea and Kensington by more than a year between 2004-6 and 2009-10, to twelve years, and among the London boroughs by four years from 1999-2001 to 2006-8. In Sweden, the gap between groups of low and high education grew from 2-3 years in 1986 to five years in 2007. Class differences of life expectancy beat or equal national ones.   On an international average level, the global gap in 2010 between the rich country group and the UN set of “least developed countries” was 27 years, between Sierra Leone and Japan. Between two parts of the Glasgow conglomeration it was 28, between Calton in the eastern periphery of the central city and the leafy suburb of Lenzie. Between the most prosperous Swedish municipality of Danderyd, a northern suburb of Stockholm, and the poor one of Pajala, in the far north, the average male life expectancy shortens by 8.6 years, slightly more than the life expectancy gap between Sweden and Egypt.   Most of this widening gap is driven by longer lives among the upper and upper middle classes. However, in the USA and even in a well-organized society like Finland, there is currently an absolute decline of the life expectancy of the most disadvantaged. Death rates at ages 35-64 increased considerably for the poorest fifth of Finnish women between 2004 and 2007, i.e., before the crisis, and from 1988 to 2007 they soared among singles and unemployed men as well as women.   Why are low-status men and women dying early? The first serious answer is: because being put down and controlled from above produce stress hormones which weaken your immunity defence and make you much more vulnerable to a number of diseases. This was discovered already in the 1970s and 1980s by industrial stress researchers, from the long bygone times when there was a public interest in what in Germany was called “Humanisierung der Arbeit“.   It has later been corroborated by large-scale longitudinial studies of employees of the central government bureaucracy in London Whitehall and of the city of Helsinki. Controlling for smoking, alcohol, and obesity, the results are clear: the lower you are in a job hierarchy (of permanent employment in this case), the earlier you tend to die. Both studies have been conducted twice, in the late 20th century and in the early 21st century. Hierarchical vital inequality increased over time among men in both cases and staid stable among women.   There is now a solid body of evidence that unemployment produces premature death. Already by 2010, the financial crisis had caused 8000 more suicides in the EU, compared to what would have happened if the pre-crisis trend had continued. A large longitudinal study of unemployed people in Sweden in late 20th century, with controls for pre-unemployment health, found an increased death rate of 2.47 percentage points over a time span of 10-17 years.   Translated into an estimate of premature deaths in the EU from the 9.5 million increase in unemployment during the crisis would mean about 235,000 premature deaths by 2020-25. This figure is, of course, a “guesstimate”, but a six-digit premature death toll is the best available evaluation of the human costs of the Anglo-Saxon bankers’ crisis.   To tackle this, and the underlying structural inequality of elementary life chances, is this without any doubt the crucial task of 2015-19. The fundamental reason why even generous welfare states have so far failed to narrow the life-expectancy gap is that in contrast to other cases of exploitation, degrading, and disadvantage, the victims do not have the best knowledge and therefore have not been able to develop strong social movements against this literally lethal discrimination. The processes involved are gradual, long-term, and are still not fully understood even by the medical experts who have spotted them and their effects.   What is required, then, is cooperation between, on the one hand, medical and other academic experts, and, on the other, trade unions and civic movements in order to make it a social and political scandal that low-status people shall have much shorter lives than more privileged ones. This is a violation of the most elementary human rights and human dignity.   (Göran Therborn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and Affiliated Professor of Sociology at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Formerly he was co-Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala, and also Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University Nijmegen, Netherlands.)   http://www.socialeurope.eu/focus/social-europe-2019/ Visit the related web page
	Activists protest World Bank roll back of rights protection by Oakland Institute, agencies   October 10th, 2014   Activists protest World Bank roll back of rights protection   More than 235 organizations, including NGOs, unions, and farmer and consumer groups from over 100 countries, signatories to the Joint Statement of the Our Land Our Business campaign, are demanding that the World Bank immediately end its Doing Business rankings and the new Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture project.   On October 10th, as the Bank leaders converge in Washington D.C. for the World Bank’s annual meeting, creative mobilizations will be held simultaneously in 10 cities around the world, sending the World Bank a clear message to abandon its disastrous indicators that are facilitating the theft of land and resources from some of the world’s poorest people –farmers, pastoralists, and indigenous communities– many of whom are essential food producers for the entire planet.   On October 10th the Our Land Our Business day of action will include:   A panel discussion, “Orienting Agricultural Development with Indicators?” at the World Bank Civil Society Policy Forum.   We are protesting the World Bank’s dismantling of protections for people and the planet. Despite World Bank President Kim’s public promise that safeguards would not be diluted, the new draft “Environmental and Social Framework” released by the Bank dismantles the protections and public accountability that people’s movements fought for over decades and falls far short of the rules needed to protect the environment and respect the rights of affected communities, workers and indigenous peoples.   http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/worldvsbank-day-action http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/10/world-bank-group-proposed-policy-setback-rights http://ourlandourbusiness.org/ http://www.rtfn-watch.org/ http://bankonhumanrights.org/ http://www.escr-net.org/node/365591 http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/28/world-bank-reject-plan-roll-back-safeguards http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16451 http://www.cao-ombudsman.org/ http://www.ciel.org/Publications/IFC_LessonsLearned_13Jun2014.pdf http://www.cao-ombudsman.org/   The Global Land Rush. (Oakland Institute, agencies)   The first years of the twenty-first century will be remembered for a global land rush of nearly unprecedented scale.   An estimated 500 million acres, an area eight times the size of Britain, was reported bought or leased across the developing world between 2000 and 2011, often at the expense of local food security and land rights.   When the price of food spiked in 2008, pushing the number of hungry people in the world to over one billion, it spiked the interest of investors as well, and within a year foreign land deals in the developing world rose by a staggering 200 percent.   Today, enthusiasm for agriculture borders on speculative mania. Driven by everything from rising food prices to growing demand for biofuel, the financial sector is taking an interest in farmland as never before.   The Oakland Institute has reported since 2011 how a new generation of institutional investors – including hedge funds, private equity, pension funds, and university endowments – is eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.   But the thing most consistently missed about this global land rush is that it is precisely that – global. Although media coverage tends to focus on land grabs in low-income countries, the opposite side of the same coin is a new rush for U.S. farmland, manifesting itself in rising interest from investors and surging land prices, as giants like the pension fund TIAA-CREF commit billions to buy agricultural land.   One industry leader estimates that 10 billion dollars in institutional capital is looking for access to U.S. farmland, but that figure could easily rise as investors seek to ride out uncertain financial times by placing their money in the perceived safety of agriculture.   In the next 20 years, as the U.S. experiences an unprecedented crisis of retiring farmers, there will be ample opportunity for these actors to expand their holdings as an estimated 400 million acres changes generational hands. And yet, the domestic face of this still unfolding land rush remains largely unseen.   For all their size and ambition, virtually nothing is known about these new investors and their business practices. Who do they buy land from? What do they grow? How do they manage their properties? In an industry not known for its transparency, none of these questions have a satisfactory answer.   For more than six years the Oakland Institute has been at the forefront of exposing the murky nature of land deals in the developing world. The challenge today is to begin a more holistic discussion that places transfer of land in both the developed and developing worlds along the same continuous spectrum.   Driven by the same structural factors and perpetrated by many of the same investors, the corporate consolidation of agriculture is being felt just as strongly in Iowa and California as it is in the Philippines and Mozambique.   Down on the Farm, a new report from the Oakland Institute, aims to increase awareness of the overlapping global and national factors enabling the new American land rush, while at the same time introduces the motives and practices of some of the most powerful players involved in it: UBS Agrivest, a subsidiary of the biggest bank in Switzerland; the Hancock Agricultural Investment Group (HAIG), a subsidiary of the biggest insurance company in Canada; and the Teacher Annuity Insurance Association College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), one of the largest pension funds in the world.   Only by studying the motives and practices of these actors today does it become possible to begin building policies and institutions that help ensure farmers, and not absentee investors, are the future of our food system.   Nothing is more crucial than beginning this discussion today. The issue may seem small for a variety of reasons – because institutional investors only own an apparently tiny one percent of all U.S. farmland, or because farmers are still the biggest buyers of farmland across the country.   But to take either of these views is to become dangerously blind to the long-term trends threatening our agricultural heritage.   Consider the fact that investors believe that there is roughly 1.8 trillion dollars’ worth of farmland across the United States. Of this, between 300 and 500 billion dollars is considered to be of “institutional quality,” a combination of factors relating to size, water access, soil quality, and location that determine the investment appeal of a property.   This makes domestic farmland a huge and largely untapped asset class. Some of the biggest actors in the financial sector have already sought to exploit this opportunity by making equity investments in farmland. Frequently, these buyers enter the market with so much capital that their funds are practically limitless compared with the resources of most farmers.   Although they have made an impressive foothold, this is the beginning, not the end, of a land rush that could literally change who owns the country and our food and agricultural systems. Not only is there space in the market for institutional investors to expand, but there are also major financial incentives for them to do so.   If action is not taken, then a perfect storm of global and national trends could converge to permanently shift farm ownership from family businesses to institutional investors and other consolidated corporate operations.   http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/publications http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/ak241e http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/04/land-seizures-speeding-up-leaving-africans-homeless-and-landless/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/05/small-farmers-loss-land-increases-world-hunger//ak241e00.htm http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/agrarian-reform-mainmenu-36/1775-declaration-of-the-global-convergence-of-land-and-water-struggles   October 2014   Small Scale Food Producers are the Solution to the Global Food Crisis, by Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Martin Drago.   Today, World Food Day, we are confronted with the failure of our global food system: 805 million people are going hungry while obesity affects over 2 billion of us.   The hungry are mostly the rural poor living in developing countries, predominantly peasants and other small-scale food producers, from Africa, Asia Nearly one of every nine people go to bed hungry every night, but not Adolfo and his family, despite the fact that he is from an area devastated by the effects of climate change and flooding, the Lempe Valley in El Salvador.   "The solution to global hunger is within our grasp, but it requires a fundamental reform of the global food system: a wholesale shift from industrial farming to agroecology and food sovereignty."   Adolfo knows from first hand experience that agricultural diversity and saving traditional seeds are essential to the livelihoods of small scale food producers, who, in turn, play a vital role in feeding local people.   Governments around the world have sidelined small-scale food producers for decades, pushing millions of them into hunger. Yet, even today, most of the world’s food is still grown by them, using traditional seed varieties and without the use of industrial inputs.   Peasants like Adolfo are the primary food producers feeding the world today. And we desperately need them, not more industrial farming, if we are to feed the planet in the context of climate change and widespread degradation of natural resources.   In Africa, peasants grow almost all locally consumed food. In Latin America, 60 per cent of farming, including meat, comes from small-scale family farms. In Asia, the global rice powerhouse, almost all rice is grown on farms of less than 2 hectares.   Yet industrial farming - based on monocultures, hybrid seeds, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers - is still promoted heavily by agribusinesses and some governments as the best way to provide food for the planet.   Yet, evidence shows that industrial farming is destroying the resources we rely on to produce our food. Desertification of soils, a diminishing genetic pool, and dead-sea zones from fertilizer runoff are just some of the effects of industrial farming. Climate change is another huge challenge that could bring down agricultural productivity significantly by 2050, especially in developing countries. Ironically, industrial farming is itself a major contributor to climate change because of its reliance on fossil fuels and fertilizers.   Despite this, backers of industrial agriculture point to our growing population and the need to produce more food as a justification for ignoring its real environmental consequences.   But we know that producing more food and increasing yields are not the sole challenges. In fact, we already produce enough food to feed our population today and in the future.   The problem is not lack of food, rather its unbalanced distribution. Access to food is dictated by wealth and profit rather than need, when "free trade" is promoted over the Right to Food.   As a result, half the world’s grain now feeds factory-farmed animals and a huge proportion of food crops are turned into agrofuels to fuel cars, taking food from the hungry and diverting it to wealthy consumers.   Our real hunger challenge today is to raise incomes and sustain the livelihoods of small-scale food producers, enabling them to feed themselves and local people sustainably. Facing this challenge, the food sovereignty movement has emerged as an incredibly effective alternative to the industrial food system.   The movement for food sovereignty is backed by more than 300 million small- scale food producers as well as consumers, environmentalists and human rights Food sovereignty is fundamentally different from food security. A country focused on achieving food security does not distinguish where food comes from, or the conditions under which it is produced and distributed. National food security targets are often met by sourcing food produced under environmentally destructive and socially exploitative conditions that destroy local food producers but benefit agribusiness corporations.   On the other hand, food sovereignty promotes community control of resources and access to land for small-scale producers. It prioritizes peoples’ ownership of their food policies. Importantly, it demands the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through agroecology – the application of ecological principles to farming.   In the past few years, new evidence from several United Nations agencies has recognized agroecology as the most effective way to tackle the multiple crises of hunger, environmental damage and poverty. A 2011 analysis of agro-ecology found that it has the potential to double small farmers’ food production in 10 years.   Even a fraction of such a gain would go a very long way to substantially decrease world hunger. The evidence is clear but changing the food system is difficult.   The power of seed and pesticide companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta, of gigantic supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, and of grain traders such as Cargill has grown so strong that they exert a massive influence over national food policies. This ensures that agribusinesses still receive billions of dollars in subsidies and policy support.   The solution to global hunger is within our grasp, but it requires a fundamental reform of the global food system: a wholesale shift from industrial farming to agroecology and food sovereignty.   It is Adolfo"s knowledge, and that of millions of peasants like him that we want to celebrate with the motto of World Food Day 2014: Family farming: feeding the world, caring for the Earth.   * Kirtana Chandrasekaran and Martin Drago are food sovereignty program coordinators at Friends of the Earth International. Increase in Biofuels Mandates is forcing World’s Poor Off their Land, says ActionAid: http://www.actionaidusa.org/news/huge-increase-us-biofuels-mandates-forcing-worlds-poor-their-land-says-actionaid#sthash.X5sUBJ2K.dpuf   http://www.actionaidusa.org/news/huge-increase-us-biofuels-mandates-forcing-worlds-poor-their-land-says-actionaid Visit the related web page
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